104

Inside the bag, Marcus silently began counting.

He needed to slow his breathing and his heart rate. He felt a bit better when the Toyota began moving, but he continued counting down from fifty.

Then he did it again.

Marcus had never struggled with claustrophobia and wasn’t now. Darkness had always been his friend; he used to joke with Elena that his favorite verse of Scripture was John chapter 3, verse 19: “Men loved the darkness.” The very thought of being zipped up in a body bag, surrounded by dead bodies and body parts, would have freaked her out. But not him. That was not what was causing his heart rate to spike well above normal.

What was? As he lay there, feeling every bump in the road, he tried not just to slow his pulse but his mind, to sift things through and make sense of the intensity of the past few days. For one thing, every part of his body was in pain. The burns on his chest and feet and groin felt worse today than yesterday. His face had been mangled. He had gashes and contusions all over his arms and legs. The only thing he had eaten in days was what that priest had graciously served him back at the church.

It was not just physical, though. What he had seen and heard of al-Masri and his men was nothing short of demonic. Marcus could still see the burning bodies of the IDF soldiers in those vehicles along the border road. He could see the ones who had fought back so hard and so well yet had not made it. Then there was the senseless missile war raging between Israel and Hezbollah, all of it driven by Iran. So many people were being killed on both sides of the border. So many homes and businesses were being damaged and destroyed. Hadn’t the people of Israel and Lebanon suffered enough? Wasn’t there already more than enough bitterness and bile to last several generations? What good could come from all of this?

Lebanon once had been the “Switzerland of the Middle East,” an oasis nestled along the gorgeous, glistening Mediterranean. Peaceful. Prosperous. Fun. Multicultural. Multireligious. Tolerant. Respectful. Sweet. Quiet. Yet now, after decades of war and terror, it was a basket case. The country was bankrupt. The currency was in freefall. The political leadership was paralyzed and corrupt. Why did the good people of Lebanon accept all this? Didn’t they want more? Didn’t they want something better? Why didn’t they rise up against Sheikh al-Hussaini and say, “Enough”? Why didn’t they drive Hezbollah out of their beautiful, extraordinary country the way Jordan’s King Hussein had driven the PLO out of his?

Then again, Marcus thought, what were the people really supposed to do? They did not have a strong, decisive monarch, a man of peace and moderation like King Hussein and his son, King Abdullah. Maybe they could have cut out Hezbollah like a cancer early on, back in the eighties or nineties. Now it was probably too late. The Sheikh and his forces were too strong, too entrenched, and somewhere along the way Lebanon had ceased to be a sovereign, independent nation-state. It was now, for all intents and purposes, a province of the mullahs of Iran.

Yet even all this, as wrenching and unjust as it was, was not the main thing fueling Marcus’s anger and his fears. It was, he knew as he thought about it more, Kailea and Yigal. The historic, epic, ancient, intractable troubles of Lebanon and Iran and the entire region were way above his pay grade. He was not paid to fix the problems of the Levant. His job was to protect people like Kailea and Yigal. And he had failed. What was eating at him was not knowing where they were, not knowing if they were alive, not knowing if they were okay, and being pretty sure they were not.

Marcus felt the Glock in his right hand and the knife in his left. He was not growing calmer. He was getting angrier by the minute, and that was the problem. His rage might not have been an unjustified emotion, but it was not going to be helpful. When they arrived at their destination, he needed to be calm, focused, surgical, and ready for anything.

He took several breaths and tried to imagine what was happening up front. He could picture Tomer behind the wheel and Callaghan riding shotgun. Jenny was in the back, giving them directions. He could hear her. And Noah was updating the Global Operations Center back at Langley on the fact that they had him—aka “the package”—in their possession and were moving to the final stage of the operation. And Geoff? What was Mr. Stone doing? Marcus had not heard him say a word. But as he listened more closely, he heard magazines being ejected and reinserted. Geoff was triple-checking everyone’s weapons.

Just in case.

Marcus was grateful for these guys. They had been through hell for him, and it was not over yet. As he lay there in the darkness, waiting for the battle to begin, the number six began echoing in his head. Six, as in minutes. That’s what Tomer had said. If they had been just six minutes later, Marcus would not be with this team that he had come to love so much. He would instead be in the hands of the most formidable and feared terrorist organization on the planet.

How thin was the margin in the world he had chosen.